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Tablets Becoming Must-Have Device For Kids Of All Ages, Ofcom Research Finds
Research by U.K. telecoms regulator Ofcom has found that tablet usage among children is on the rise, with growing numbers of younger kids, especially, turning to tablets to watch videos, play games and access the Internet.
The annual report into children’s media consumption habits also records a drop in the overall number of children between the ages of 5 and 15 who own a mobile phone, with the percentage falling from 49% last year to 43% in 2013. It’s the first such drop since the survey began, back in 2005.
Ofcom says this decline is mainly down to a steep fall in the proportion of younger kids (8-11) owning a basic mobile phone (as opposed to a smartphone). Basic phone ownership among the latter age-group stood at 28% last year and has fallen steeply to 15% this year. Bottom line: you can’t even flog feature phones to tweens.
But, while basic phones are being ditched by kids, tablets usage is rising across the board. Among the younger kids’ age group, 18% own a smartphone, and the same proportion own a tablet. However the report notes that while the smartphone figure is “largely stable” year-on-year, tablet ownership has grown four-fold since last year, when it stood at just 4%.
As you might expect, smartphone ownership is much higher among older children (12-15) than 8-11s, with the older group being likely to be more interested in using connected devices to communicate, rather than primarily looking for a gadget to watch audio-visual content and play games (likely why tablets, well suited to the entertainment use-case, are doing so well with younger kids category). But even among the older group, the report found that tablet usage is on the rise.
The majority (62%) of 12-15-year-olds own a smartphone, according to the research – a proportion that Ofcom said is unchanged since last year — vs just over a quarter (26%) who own a tablet computer. The latter figure is up considerably on last year when just 7% said they had a slate.
Ofcom said the use of tablets has tripled among 5-15s since 2012, rising from 14% to 42% over that period. While just over a quarter (28%) of infants aged 3-4 now use a tablet computer at home (albeit, this age group is likely using a tablet owned by their parents).
Similarly, tablet usage is rising rapidly among 5-7 year olds (now at 39%, up from 11% last year) and 8-11 year olds (at 44%, up from 13%). The report notes that these very young Internet users are five times more likely than last year to mostly use a tablet when accessing the Internet at home (at 19%, up from 4%).
“Tablet computers are growing fast in popularity, becoming a must-have device for children of all ages,” it adds.
As tablet usage grows, more traditional devices are inevitably being used less to go online. The report found that the proportion of children mainly using a laptop, netbook or desktop computer to access the Internet has fallen to 68% — down from 85% in 2012. While twice as many children as last year are mainly using other devices to go online, with tablets (13%) and mobiles (11%) the most popular device choices.
As the number of Internet-connected devices continues to proliferate, it’s also no surprise that the traditional TV set is becoming less of a focal point for kids’ entertainment too. Compared to last year, the report found that children are more likely to watch programmes on devices other than a TV, such as a laptop, tablet or mobile phone. Nearly half (45%) of children aged 5-15 are doing so, up from 34% last year, it notes.
Social shifts
Interestingly, the research flags up an apparent change in social media habits among kids. For the first time, fewer children have online social media profiles, with 12-15s much less likely to say they have a profile on any device (68% this year, down from 81% last).
“The mix of social media used by children is evolving. While nearly all 12-15s with an active online profile continue to use Facebook (97%), they are now less likely to have a profile on Bebo (4%, down from 8% last year) and more likely to have a profile on Twitter (37%, from 25%),” the report notes.
Other social networks with a growing profile among this age group include YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr:
Instant messaging is also rising in popularity with this age group. The research found that 12-15s are now less likely to go online weekly to visit social networking sites (67% vs 75%) and more likely to go online for instant messaging (55% vs 45%).
Kids with smartphones send an estimated 184 instant messages in a typical week, according to Ofcom’s data. One bright spot for carriers: traditional text messaging (SMS) remains a highly popular way of communicating for youngsters, especially those aged 12-15. These teenagers send on average 255 SMSes per week, up from 193 last year.
What are younger kids generally using the Internet for? Schoolwork is the most mentioned activity carried out at least weekly by 8-11s (75%), followed by games (54%) and finding information (45%), according to Ofcom’s data.
Weekly use of the Internet for telephone or video calls is also on the rise among children vs last year’s research (now at 10%, up from 5%), as is going to photo-sharing websites (at 5%, up from 2%).
With $3M In New Funding, Memoto Lifelogging Startup Rebrands To Narrative To Go Global
Swedish startup Memoto did well on Kickstarter – well enough to earn the company 11 times its funding goal, or $550,000 to drive the creation of its lifelogging camera. The small camera is designed to be worn on your person, features no buttons and takes pictures constantly while worn, but as of today it’s called the “Narrative Clip,” not the Memoto, as its creators rebrand to Narrative with $3 million in new funding. Both the rebrand and the new money will help Narrative expand on a global scale, the company says.
Memoto was a problematic name for global ambitions because it conflicted with the name of something else in the same market, the company explained in a release, so to make sure it didn’t run into any problems with trademarks worldwide, the Stockholm-based startup made the tough decision to switch to Narrative for their branding, which is pretty fitting, especially since now there’s freedom to develop more products beyond just the eponymous camera.
The design of the newly remained Narrative Clip remains the same, however, so pre-order customers can expect the same device to ship to them. And Narrative now has even more money in the coffers in addition to its big Kickstarter raise, thanks to a $3 million round led by San Francisco’s True Ventures. True Ventures has previously invested in hardware startups including MakerBot and Fitbit, and Narrative’s aims are somewhat parallel to those of Fitbit, with more of an emphasis on quantifying non fitness data. The round also included LDV Capital and London’s Passion Capital, which has backed photo sharing apps including EyeEm and Loopcam in the past.
The Narrative Clip should ship by November to the first customers, according to Narrative, and the $279 debut product is still available for pre-order in grey, white and orange. The device takes a photo every 30 seconds, and passes along geolocation data as well as date and time information to an online service that keeps track of your logged photos and makes them available to review or share. Photos are 5 megapixels, and the device has a built-in rechargeable battery that lasts up to two days.
Narrative might face a small challenge in terms of building on its existing momentum with completely new branding, but the lifelogging camera is still in very early stages, and hasn’t even shipped hardware yet, so the name switch is unlikely to drastically affect its chances at success. Early sample photos suggest this kind of scattershot approach at social photography could have some very lovely results, too, so I’ll be more interested to see how the Narrative Clip gets used by its first batch of owners as they set out to leave no stone undocumented.
Netskope Comes Out Of Stealth With $21M From Social+Capital And Lightspeed And A “Dream Team” Of Enterprise Vets
The double rise of cloud-based services and consumerization have been two of the biggest developments in enterprise IT, but they have also led to one of the biggest conundrums: IT managers and CIOs who may be happy to see employees switched on and working, but also facing big headaches around managing and monitoring potentially thousands of apps that their people are now using. Today, a new startup called Netskope is launching out of stealth to try to meet that challenge head on, with a new platform that lets companies monitor all of the cloud-based apps that employees use and set security policies to protect against data breaches and more. “Our solution allows you to go rogue, but in a safe and compliant way,” CEO Sanjay Beri tells me.
Netskope is not your ordinary startup. Out of the gates, it’s launching with $21.4 million in funding from Social+Capital Partnership and Lightspeed Venture Partners. And, it also has what Beri described to me as a “dream team” of engineers and others from some of the most impressive enterprise IT startups that Silicon Valley has produced — Palo Alto Networks, McAfee, and PayPal among them — some 55 employees in all, many of them 15-20 year veterans of the industry.
“We’re the anti-startup,” Beri says. “These are people who were fed up with complacency and entrenched attitudes at their past employers.” A fitting start for a company that is also trying to tackle a similar challenge at the enterprise level.
That $21 million has come in two tranches, both raised with Netskope was still in stealth mode. The first was a $5.5 million seed round from Social + Capital; the second, a $15.9 million round closed earlier this year from Lightspeed.
That’s not the only ammunition that the company has: while still under the radar, it was running a private beta with a number of companies, with sizes ranging from 5,000 to 25,000 employees. This has produced several paying customers. Two that are being named today are Vegas.com and Universal Music Group, although Beri notes that there are more in the Fortune 500 category, some of which will be revealed in the coming weeks.
The idea behind Netskope is that it assumes that both consumerization — the idea that employees will keep bringing their own ideas to the table in terms of what devices and services they use at work, and many of these will be riffs on what they use at home — and cloud services are inevitable trends. That leads to a messy landscape of services getting used, often to share sensitive information. “If you’re a CIO or CSO, frankly you don’t even know what’s going on the cloud. You are blindfolded,” Beri says. “But what do you do? Tell them to stop using these applications? You are going to be the villain if you do that. These apps are brought in for a reason: for productivity.”
And so, rather than trying to tailor IT policy to try to mimic these, the best thing to do is to go along with whatever the employees want to do — to “eliminate the Catch-22,” in Beri’s words. Netskope’s platform does that. It currently is able to support some 3,000 different applications in its service — from the most popular to those less-well-known. What it does, Beri tells me, is that after it is turned on by the IT department, it scans the network and user devices to detect different apps and starts monitoring from there, in real time. IT managers can in turn use this to track how information moves, and to set policies to limit usage, warn users of bad practices and so on.
“We are look at any transactions that are happen between users and applications,” Beri says. “For any activity where data traverses between you and a server, Netskope can perform data analysis on that.”
Netskope currently works across what it has organized as 50 different categories of apps — around areas like workforce collaboration, CRM, accounting, sales and so on. That fact that there is so much fragmentation among them — and even within services from single vendors like Microsoft, or Oracle or Salesforce — is almost a blessing for Netskope.
Like other SaaS offerings, Netskope’s platform is sold at a yearly subscription. With many other SaaS apps turning to monthly and even pay-as-you-go services, it will be interesting to see if these tiers also get added to Netskope’s plans, especially as it grows out and perhaps extends more into the small-business segment.
For all the impact that companies like Amazon Web Services has had on the growth of cloud-based services, Beri says Netskope is “absolutely not” relying on it or other third-party providers as its own infrastructure provider. “We are very focused on security,” he says. The company, instead has gone into partnership with the carrier-neutral data center provider Equinix, with whom it’s chosen to build its own high performance, high security cloud. “Large enterprises really need to invest in certified infrastructure,” he says. (That’s only part of where this investment is going, though: the rest is to sales and general employee retention, no small thing when you have such a senior staff.)
That “anti-startup” positioning has also stood in good stead on another front: that of intellectual property. Beri says Netskope has already filed some 36 patents, a benefit of having as its founding employees “some of the principle architects of some of the major enterprise companies out there today.”
To kick off its launch, Netskope’s also produced a report on some of the stats that it has amassed about enterprise app usage so far — a testament to some of the big data credentials of the startup, and perhaps even a sign of how it might be able to leverage that kind of data in the future. Here’s the what the company found to be the top ten most popular enterprise cloud apps. Not too many surprises among them.
Pursway Raises $7.2M To Help Marketers Find Social Influencers
Influencer marketing company Pursway is announcing that it has raised $7.2 million in Series B funding.
Pursway says that it takes a unique approach to helping businesses reach the people most likely to drive sales — an approach it describes as “socializing data.” The company has built a database (pulled from online sources like alumni lists, event attendees, and employment history) mapping the social relationships of more than 100 million US consumers.
By overlaying its data on each business’ customer and sales database, it can supposedly “reveal who is a friend of whom and identify purchase influence.” The business can then target its marketing efforts at the people who, thanks to their online influence, are most likely to convince others to buy the marketer’s products.
“For us, influence is about one person having purchase influence over others, i.e. making others actually spend money, not about how many social media friends and followers they have,” a company spokesperson told me.
Sony Card Marketing & Services Company (part of the larger Sony Corporation of America) has seen a 300 percent increase in results and conversions in its prospecting campaigns, according to senior vice president Steven Fuld (who’s quoted in the funding press release).
To build Pursway’s technology, the company says CTO and founder Guy Gildor drew on his seven years of experience developing data mining software for the Israeli military.
The new funding comes from Battery Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners, who both previously invested. (Pursway raised a $6 million Series A.) Pursway told me there were other investors interested in the deal, “but we chose to keep things simple and stay focused on operational execution.”
Koality Closes Its $1.8 Million Seed Round From FF Angel And Others
Shortly after taking the stage at Disrupt SF, development startup Koality just announced that it has closed its seed round. The $1.8 million round was led by FF Angel‘s Peter Thiel. Other angels and small funds participated as well.
The two founders used to work at Palantir where they initially met Peter Thiel. When I last talked to Koality co-founder and CEO Jonathan Chu, he told me that Thiel was very encouraging and really wanted them to start and build a new startup. The funding confirms that.
As a reminder, Koality is a seamless server-side application that sits between your startup’s repository and your engineers’ computers to improve code changes. You don’t have to change your workflow — but instead of pushing code to your repository, your patches will first go through Koality. The server will then run test suites before submitting to the repository. If there is something wrong with your code, you will receive a notification. Koality effectively ends broken builds and countless wasted hours.
Another advantage of Koality is that it can greatly speed up testing times. It runs tests in parallel on multiple replicas of your environment. Moreover, you don’t have to leave your computer open to run the tests because everything happens on the servers.
While Chu didn’t go into detail, he told me that the company already has very high-profile clients. Most of the teams that use Koality have 15 engineers or more. The product gets more expensive with bigger teams. That’s why the startup could expect significant revenue from startups over 100 engineers.
Webb Investment Network, Index Ventures, Felicis Ventures and UJ Ventures also participated in today’s seed round. Angels such as Kris Duggan, Raymond Tonsing and Tien Tzuo put some money as well.
The software testing platform is just a first product for Koality. While there is still some work to do to polish its existing offering, the startup plans to release other development products to help engineering teams and make their work easier. Testing was the biggest pain point and needed to be taken care of. But there are many other opportunities for the future.
Goldee Does Dynamic Lighting For Philips Hue, Banks On A Future Where Light Isn't Static
A brand new app called Goldee launches today, offering Phlips Hue users a new way to use their connected lighting system. The app provides dynamic “light scenes” which use artist-sourced photos as their palette, changing tones gradually to provide dynamic shifts in color, including gradual on/off sequences for waking up in the morning or going to sleep at night.
There are 10 different scenes included in the app at launch, each which a brief description and credits (citing the scene’s creator, the photographer of the source image and the location where it was taken). Tapping on any starts the dynamic lighting, with each bulb attached to your Philips Hue system taking part. You can specific if you have multiple rooms in a single home with Hue bulbs, too, and run a different scene for each. The first light scene also has an alarm feature, and the last one has a sleep timer for going to bed.
The app works well, but there are some caveats – you have to have the app running in the foreground to get the dynamic effect to work, and the screensaver built-in to keep your display from using too much juice is a little finicky when it comes to returning your display to full brightness once you activate the screen again. But on the whole, it’s a unique experience, and one that Hue owners are likely to appreciate.
“The Goldee team started innovating home lighting even before Philips hue was introduced,” Goldee CEO Tomas Baran explained in an interview. “We figured out right away that Philips hue is a very good tool to build upon [with lighting]. However, the Goldee App is only our first step towards changing how we perceive and interact with light.”
Baran says that there are plans in place to do “something much bigger,” which he expects to reveal more about later this year. He calls light “a new form of art,” hence sourcing its scenes from people with experience in that field, and notes that light is never static in nature. I asked whether this might be a bit narrow in terms of focus for a whole company, but Baran says Goldee is betting we’re just seeing the beginning of change in this space.
“Every new thing is risky in the beginning, but if we wait until it becomes popular it will already be too late,” he said. “We believe a revolution has started in the lighting sector with smart LEDs. We have no doubt this will be the future. We used to watch black-and-white TVs, nowadays we cannot imagine a display without colors. Obviously, it will take time, but we see the same thing happening with light. “
The app is free, and so far the only content that’s locked within the app can be made available via either rating the app or sharing via Twitter and Facebook. There is a “library” section that promises to add additional light scenes in future, and some of those may arrive as paid upgrades. For now, Goldee is a well-executed curiosity, but it’ll be interesting to see if smart lights really do herald the kinds of changes Baran envisions.
Kleiner Perkins Adds Year-Long Product Manager Track To Design And Engineering Fellows Program
For the past two years, Kleiner Perkins has operated a summer fellowship program to place top engineering and design talent from colleges at the firm’s portfolio companies. Today, the firm is expanding this program to include a year-long product manager track that allows recent grands from college and graduate school gain experience in product roles.
As we’ve explained in the past, the benefit is two-fold: students get to work at the startup level, are mentored and startups get access to talent that could become full-time. The Engineering and Design fellows program has been a summer program, where students are placed in internship-like roles at portfolio companies for three months at a time. With the product track, Kleiner was seeking to really immerse potential product managers into a startup, with the hope that the post-grad could eventually land a more permanent role with the company.
The KPCB Product Fellows Program is open to U.S. undergraduate or graduate students who will complete their school in 2014. The program is one year-long and starts in July of 2014. The desired candidate has a degree in computer science, engineering, math, physics or other fields related to software engineering. Applicants with
additional, or joint, degrees in design, business or other relevant fields encouraged.
The program’s engineering and design tracks have been successful so far–since launch, Kleiner Perkins has received nearly 2,500 applications. In total, there have been 65 Engineering Fellows and 12 Design fellows. Of these fellows, over 90% received offers to join the company the following year. In fact, a 2012 engineering Fellow (Dylan Field, Brown) went on to raise a $3.8 million dollar round in seed funding for his start-up (Figma). Last year, 15 Kleiner-backed companies are hosting Engineering Fellows including Apcera, AppDynamics, Chegg, Coursera, Gumroad, Klout, Nebula, Nest, OKL, Opower, ShapeSecurity, Shopkick, Square, Twitter and Upthere.
As Kleiner Pekins partner Juliet de Baubigny explains to me Kleiner will try to match students and companies based on their interests, and expertise (if they have any specialization). And the fellow will be receiving a salary directly from the portfolio company, and this will be consistent with an entry-level product manager position.
Landing a product role at a hot startup can be a challenging job for any student out of school–the Kleiner program allows recent grads to see if they really want to focus on product, and allows a company to test out whether the individual is a good fit. And Kleiner brings more talent to the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. Interested students can apply for the fellowships here.
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